D’Angiulli — who recently studied the thinking patterns of children from poor cities in B.C.’s Interior — remembers lagging his peers in being deprived of a calculator, and later a computer, while living with his single mother in the tough port city of Taranto, in Italy.

His mother was often sick, leaving relatives to care for D’Angiulli, who had to carefully watch his step on travels through the rough town to avoid getting mugged.

D’Angiulli was a bookworm, and he overcame the odds, becoming the first in his extended family to enter university. Driven by his own formative challenges, he’s now at Carleton University in Ottawa, studying the effects of poverty on children’s development.

In an interview with The Province, D’Angiulli is impassioned, plain-speaking and somewhat contrarian. It’s not surprising he’s coming to conclusions that cut directly across the grain of many of his colleagues’ research.

Since the 1970s, scientists have formed a consensus that factors related to poverty — parental stress and exposure to violence, substance abuse and chaotic surroundings — lead to poor mental and physical health, bad performance in school and negative outcomes in life.

Now scientists are using brain-imaging technology to show that the actual wiring of the growing brain is tweaked by the chronic stress of living poor.

But D’Angiulli argues that these brain changes are not necessarily some kind of warping.

“There’s been a lot of research on poverty, but I think it’s been blaming-the-victim research,” D’Angiulli says. “We need research that looks at positive and adaptive aspects, besides the deficit [of growing up in poverty].”

In one study, D’Angiulli compared the different ways that inner-city B.C. children performed mental tasks, compared to children from middle-income families. Using a cap that monitors electrical activity in the brain, D’Angiulli asked the children to listen for a series of random tones, then hit a button each time they heard two specific sounds.

The two sets of children performed equally in speed and accuracy identifying the tones, but the brain activity recorded during the task was much different. Children from poor backgrounds tended to use more sections of their brains, as if they were picking up on every sound, while children from higher-income homes focused only on the two tones they had been instructed to identify.

The results suggest the poor children may be unsuited to structured learning tasks, but have developed a mode of thinking suited to other tasks, shaped by survival instincts.

“What surprised me is, we know that the brain is a machine that is very flexible, so these kids have adapted to the conditions in which they live,” D’Angiulli says, speaking excitedly. “We’re talking about inner city kids, exposed to dangerous and chaotic situations like prostitutes, screams, police sirens.”

“When they go to school they’re asked to adapt to a middle-class standard, and if they don’t fit that standard, they’re looked at like they’re stupid or not functional. But they were already tested on another adaptive level. Those kids had to survive.”

D’Angiulli says he’s angry with the general rigidity of schools, but systems such as the self-directed Montessori school method could better harness the different brain processes seen in poor children.

“If these kids live in a situation where there is more chaos and less predictability in the environment, they have to be able to solve that lack of order, so if you give them a task that is less structured, they are more likely to succeed,” he says. “School changes your brain, so we need to look much more seriously at the way it interacts with socio-economic and living conditions.”

D’Angiulli is already looking at simple solutions for children from all backgrounds, such as changing school schedules to better fit the alertness — or peak time for brain activity — of young students. For example, students are often asked to study or write tests at times of day when their brains are on low power, due to sleep habits or weekend activity, he says. Instead, other activities such as physical education should be scheduled in those times, to jump start a better learning day.

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